I actually don’t think this has anything to do with standing up for their users but is a simple cost/benefit analysis: building compromised E2E-communication that is still reasonably secure against bad actors is much more difficult (if not impossible) than building robust E2E-communication. Apple just doesn’t want to lose business users over headlines like „iOS messaging used by Chinese spies to steal US trade secrets“, while headlines about how difficult it is for government agencies to unlock iPhones probably drive sales. Nothing morally or ethical here, only profits.

@generalpotato Ish. I read the technical write up and they actually came up with a very clever privacy-focused way of scanning for child porn.

First, only photos were scanned and only if they were stored in iCloud.

Then, only cryptographic hashes of the photos were collected.

Those hashes were grepped for other cryptographic hashes of known child porn images, images which had to be in databases of multiple non-governmental organizations; so, if an image was only in the database of, say, the National Center For Missing And Exploited Children or only in the database of China's equivalent, its cryptographic hash couldn't be used. This requirement would make it harder for a dictator to slip in a hash to look for dissidents by making it substantially more difficult to get an image in enough databases.

Even then, an Apple employee would have to verify actual child porn was being stored in iCloud only after 20 separate images were flagged. (The odds any innocent person even makes it to this stage incorrectly was estimated to be something like one false positive a year, I think, because of all of the safeguards Apple had.)

Only after an Apple employee confirmed the existence of child porn would the iCloud account be frozen and the relevant non-government organizations alerted.

Honestly, I have a better chance of getting a handjob from Natalie Portman in the next 24 hours than an innocent person being incorrectly reported to any government authority.

I'm assuming it's either apple not wanting to be told to do it, or it's due to them "learning their lesson" and no longer support it, they seem to be leaning quite heavily into privacy

Apple wants money for spying on their users, this bill would compel them to do that without the secret money their getting now, so their against it

That's very likely the actual goal. Stopping child abuse is only an excuse, one governments keep pulling out whenever they want to push anti privacy legislation. And it's clear that this would do nothing to stop it either, because then abusers just wouldn't use compromised services from big companies.

I wouldn’t say they’re hypocritical. I was in complete shock that they actually scrapped their iPhone scanning plans and now offer E2E for most of iCloud. They aren’t perfect but they definitely are better than most companies

Man, I was hoping by moving away from Reddit I could move away from the pure hate apple for whatever reason. Show me how the other mobile OS is making things any better?

It's simple.

If it's possible for WhatsApp to intercept the communications of "bad people" for law enforcement, it's fundamentally impossible for any communication to be private. The existence of a back door is automatically a gaping security flaw.

There's no such thing as "securely intercepting" messages. Either they're secure against all actors or they're not secure.

I think law enforcement can break into your home if they have a court warrant, right? So why not allow the same thing with electronic communications?

For me, the reason to disallow it is the potential for abuse. There were 864 search warrant applications across all federal agencies in 2022. In 2020, the FBI, specifically, issued 11504 warrants to Google, specifically, for geofencing data, specifically. Across all agencies there are probably millions of such "warrants" for data.

It's far easier to access your data than your house, so comparing physical and cybersecurity doesn't really make sense.

In general, criminals can easily just move to an uncompromised platform to do illegal stuff. But giving the govt easy access to messaging data allows for all kinds of dystopic suppression for regular people.